CapLinked found our company, through the magic of the Internet on May 17th 2012.
Since that time they have been bombing our inbox on a weekly basis with worthless messages.
What is CapLinked
CapLinked claims to be a service that helps to make private investment easy and you find Investors and Advisors for your business.
But Edoceo Doesn’t Trust Them?
Nope, For a few simple reasons.
Contact via Generic Mail Address
We never contacted CapLinked, instead they contact us. Through a generic email address in our domain (info). Lame. A better demonstration of their legitimacy as an organisation would be to contact through less generic. And, of course our account was created without action on our part so our first order would be to reset the password on an account we never made.
We’ve had multiple contacts with investors, advisors, angels &c; not once has that contact come through a generically guessable address. Quite the opposite in fact, contact was made via telephone or LinkedIn.
Pre-Fab Account Creation
The initial email was because CapLinked had already created a profile for us! Unfortunately, the profile was incomplete which means any of the other CapLinked users looking at us would think we are lame due to the lack of information on our profile.
It is not cool to automatically create a public profile for a person/company with incomplete information and then ask them to claim it. CapLinked should have waited for us to come to them (eg: like CrunchBase does it).
Non-Functional Un-subscribe
Naturally we tried their un-subscribe option.
That did not work.
A sure sign of a poorly operated company is a non-functional un-subscribe system.
Claim Feature Broken
So, finally we tried to claim our company. We were sent a “Claim Edoceo on CapLinked” email with a simple hyper-link. We followed it (incognito window of course). The page showed our incomplete profile with a clearly defined “Claim this company” button – which I clicked.
Within a few seconds I was sent another “Claim Edoceo on CapLinked” email – exact same text, formatting and message – except the hyper-link hash was a bit different. So, naturally we followed that link again. That resulted in the error message: “This company has been claimed by another user.”.
Duplicated Companies to Claim
Once we finally get into their system it’s odd that there are two profiles for Edoceo – but both have the same stub. Lame.
Summary
First you make an incomplete profile of my company and notify our generic contact address it exists. Then both the Un-subscribe and Claim features of the system don’t work. Duplicated company profiles and the only way to get a verified account is to pay $40/mo. Edoceo will stick with traditional methods of engaging investors, advisors and clients.
Edoceo fixes problem like these; we build systems that work. Perhaps CapLinked should contact us to get their system operational?